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If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in their published work, they should unquestionably cite Wikipedia. When scholars fail to cite Wikipedia,

If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in their published work, they should unquestionably cite Wikipedia. When scholars fail to cite Wikipedia, a few years later other Wikipedia editors come back and cite that work as evidence for the original claim, sometimes for claims that turn out to be nonsense, and people trying to figure out what happened won’t notice that the citation chain is a circle. Cf. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ Teaching students not to cite the sources they use is a horrible teaching practice which does harm to academia. Better is to teach students to critically examine every source they use and consider its limitations (in Wikipedia’s case, being a volunteer project by a wide range of pseudonymous strangers), follow up on claims made there, check other sources for contrary claims and analyses, etc. Every source has biases and limitations. You can find plenty of fabrications and distortions snuck into e.g. New York Times stories, undergraduate history textbooks, or Supreme Court decisions. These sources should also be examined critically.

tablespoon 4y ago
> If scholars find something on Wikipedia and put it in their papers, they should absolutely cite Wikipedia. Yeah, but scholars shouldn't be putting things from Wikipedia in their paper at all (except, perhaps, in the very narrow case were Wikipedia is the object of their study). Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself, and "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia article.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and a mediocre source about many other topics. For example, the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid was mostly written by the world’s foremost expert about geodesics on an ellipsoid, and would be a fine source. Edit to add an aside: In my opinion it is worth teaching students to look at Wikipedia’s talk pages and history pages to help them critically examine articles.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and a mediocre source about many other topics. Wikipedia is a moving target, so it could be a terrible source on a topic for the hour you're looking at it, and much better at other times. Trouble is, those other times don't do you any good. That inconsistency means it can't ever really be an "excellent" source.
    - roywiggins 4y ago
      It's not the inconsistency that disqualifies it from academic citation, it's that it's a tertiary source. The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't a moving target if you cite the edition, but it's also a tertiary source, so it's just as citable as Wikipedia is, that is to say, not (except if you're treating Wikipedia as a primary source, eg you're studying Wikipedia) It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure, Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something you're allowed to cite. If a school doesn't want students to read Wikipedia at all they really should provide an alternative encyclopedia that the school thinks is high enough quality for students to use (but still not cite), I think you can get subscriptions to Encyclopedia Brittanica now? But that costs actual money.
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        > It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure, Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something you're allowed to cite. Actually, it's probably pretty smart for schools to "ban" students from using Wikipedia, in order to encourage them to develop habits to use better things. If you let them use Wikipedia for their research, you're putting them in a situation to slouch into using it for most of their research (except for some source laundering at the end).
        roywiggins 4y ago
        Sure, if you give them access to a better encyclopedia, that's not a terrible idea, I just think it's silly to have an absolute ban- "read at least two different encyclopedias" instead, maybe? "Cite N secondary sources you didn't find on Wikipedia"? And then they can find out for themselves how good or bad quality wikipedia is. The thrust of the link here is that they aren't giving them alternatives, and just telling students to throw themselves into Google and hope they find something. Which, yes, isn't a bad skill to learn either- there's stuff to find out there- but it's setting them up for failure.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself, First-hand direct presence isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia. Part of my account of the founding of amazon.com was removed because it wasn't "backed up by published citable sources". I pointed out that I would be the primary source cited by any such source, and was told that wasn't good enough: the contents had to be published somewhere else and then cited on Wikipedia. [ EDIT: BTW, the page on the history of Amazon still has some bullshit in the early section (maybe others too, I wouldn't know), mostly because a journalist or book author misunderstood something, and now it's enshrined as the wikipedia version of the truth. The citation requirements are a good idea, but they don't protect against the nature of humanity ]
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    Originally it was permitted, but too many people abused this and wasted a lot of volunteer time. :-( Now you need to get cited by someone else before wikipedia will accept it. (and preferably someone else needs to be cited too of course)
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It's outsourcing verification, and it mostly works, but "small tidbits" like you find in Hacker News comments now and then will likely never make it.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    That's a good rule. Anything you write in a Wikipedia article is written in "anonymous worker bee" mode. It doesn't count as written by you, even if you wrote it. Any editor could change what you wrote. This defeats the whole point of first-person testimony, where who said it matters. If you want to tell the story of something that happened at Amazon, you should write an article on your own website and publish it under your own name. Then anyone can cite it (including Wikipedia) as written by you, and it can't be changed or removed without your consent. (Some might not think a personal blog is a good enough citation, but that's their problem.)
    - 4y ago
- jrumbut 4y ago
  > "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia article. Using Wikipedia and citing Wikipedia is perhaps ill advised. Using Wikipedia and not citing Wikipedia is a real problem and how you create the circle of falsehoods. This idea of not using Wikipedia introduces students to the academic dishonesty game. Priority one in writing a research paper is that it be a truthful reflection of your research, including limitations, accidents, mistakes, failures, etc, etc.
thesuitonym 4y ago
If scholars find some claim in Wikipedia, they should cite the source of the claim. If the source actually is Wikipedia, it should not be included in an academic paper. It's clear to me now that there is a divide between people who used physical encyclopedias (And thus know what an encyclopedia is for) and those who have only used Wikipedia. They don't understand that an encyclopedia is a place to get a quick overview of a subject, but then use the actual sources of the information to write their papers.
- projektfu 4y ago
  But only if they actually read the claim. This is the same as for scholars that cite the source of a claim they found in a paper that is, itself, cited from some other paper. Often you see a game of telephone in these citations. Because it's not looked at well to give a factual claim you found in a review paper, researchers often cite the claim as it was cited in the review paper, but they don't always investigate the claim themselves. This leads to a game of telephone. A lot of high-profile factoids are like this. The claim that 95% of diets fail, for example, is a specious one that developed after a citation chain like this. The original analysis said that 95% of the sample finished the study above the lowest weight they reached. Through motivated rephrasing and citation laundering, this became 95% of diets fail, often paired with the suggestion that dieters always return to a weight higher than where they started. Yet, you can find this claim being re-issued again and again in the introductions to papers about all sorts of topics related to dieting. Another thing I have seen is where the source of the claim gets lost. It starts out as something like "Grainger 2003" and then eventually turns into "Grander 2013", a nonexistent paper with a ton of citations. So, if you read an article and don't read the cited article, please reference only the article you read.
- youainti 4y ago
  Except encyclopedias don't have _actual sources_. They are based on source but don't include references as far as I remember.
  - thesuitonym 4y ago
    I was going to tell you that you're wrong, but in looking it up I found far more examples of encyclopedias without sources than with, so maybe that was more common.
mountainb 4y ago
Horsehockey. Wikipedia cannot be cited because it is not a static resource. Occasionally, its citations can be cited. But generally, if you have ever tried to actually follow those citations, you will frequently discover that the authors and editors of the page are full of shit, and you will see why professionals tend to issue the blanket recommendation to avoid ever using it for anything. Minute for minute, research time is better spent on a real resource than it is spent trying to sift something useful from the trillion page shit-vault that is Wikipedia. Newspapers and textbooks aren't serious sources either, which is why academic research manuals usually forbid their usage except in some specific circumstances (such as using them as primary sources, for illustrative purposes, as evidence of what media reported at the time, etc.).
- whatshisface 4y ago
  These threads always reveal that different people have had wildly different experiences with Wikipedia. I wish everyone would clarify what those experiences actually were so we could answer questions like "is it only some parts of Wikipedia."
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  What are you talking about? Wikipedia has a perfectly adequate page on how to cite it [1] and provides tools that account for how dynamic it is in generating citations. Newspapers and textbooks are also regularly cited to demonstrate general facts of knowledge and are usually accepted anywhere other tertiary sources would also be appropriate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
- raegis 4y ago
  To be fair, you can cite a Wikipedia page along with the last revision date. And the complete revision history is available, I believe. I would expect researchers to include revision dates with any Wikipedia citation.
- nico 4y ago
  > because it is not a static resource What do you consider a “static resource”?
orangepurple 4y ago
Poppycock. Wikipedia is not a repository of primary sources nor original research. It merely aggregates information from outside sources and should be used as a reference tree.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in their published work When people say not to cite wikipedia, they're telling you to not do this. They're not asking you to plagiarize wikipedia.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  You would be amazed at the frequency with which “real” academics, journalists, lawyers, judges’ clerks, etc. plagiarize Wikipedia. Teachers telling students they can’t under any circumstances cite Wikipedia trains this behavior.
gubernation 4y ago
[flagged]

tablespoon 4y ago

> If scholars find something on Wikipedia and put it in their papers, they should absolutely cite Wikipedia. Yeah, but scholars shouldn't be putting things from Wikipedia in their paper at all (except, perhaps, in the very narrow case were Wikipedia is the object of their study). Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself, and "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia article.

jacobolus 4y ago
Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and a mediocre source about many other topics. For example, the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid was mostly written by the world’s foremost expert about geodesics on an ellipsoid, and would be a fine source. Edit to add an aside: In my opinion it is worth teaching students to look at Wikipedia’s talk pages and history pages to help them critically examine articles.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and a mediocre source about many other topics. Wikipedia is a moving target, so it could be a terrible source on a topic for the hour you're looking at it, and much better at other times. Trouble is, those other times don't do you any good. That inconsistency means it can't ever really be an "excellent" source.
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    It's not the inconsistency that disqualifies it from academic citation, it's that it's a tertiary source. The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't a moving target if you cite the edition, but it's also a tertiary source, so it's just as citable as Wikipedia is, that is to say, not (except if you're treating Wikipedia as a primary source, eg you're studying Wikipedia) It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure, Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something you're allowed to cite. If a school doesn't want students to read Wikipedia at all they really should provide an alternative encyclopedia that the school thinks is high enough quality for students to use (but still not cite), I think you can get subscriptions to Encyclopedia Brittanica now? But that costs actual money.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure, Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something you're allowed to cite. Actually, it's probably pretty smart for schools to "ban" students from using Wikipedia, in order to encourage them to develop habits to use better things. If you let them use Wikipedia for their research, you're putting them in a situation to slouch into using it for most of their research (except for some source laundering at the end).
      - roywiggins 4y ago
        Sure, if you give them access to a better encyclopedia, that's not a terrible idea, I just think it's silly to have an absolute ban- "read at least two different encyclopedias" instead, maybe? "Cite N secondary sources you didn't find on Wikipedia"? And then they can find out for themselves how good or bad quality wikipedia is. The thrust of the link here is that they aren't giving them alternatives, and just telling students to throw themselves into Google and hope they find something. Which, yes, isn't a bad skill to learn either- there's stuff to find out there- but it's setting them up for failure.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself, First-hand direct presence isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia. Part of my account of the founding of amazon.com was removed because it wasn't "backed up by published citable sources". I pointed out that I would be the primary source cited by any such source, and was told that wasn't good enough: the contents had to be published somewhere else and then cited on Wikipedia. [ EDIT: BTW, the page on the history of Amazon still has some bullshit in the early section (maybe others too, I wouldn't know), mostly because a journalist or book author misunderstood something, and now it's enshrined as the wikipedia version of the truth. The citation requirements are a good idea, but they don't protect against the nature of humanity ]
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  Originally it was permitted, but too many people abused this and wasted a lot of volunteer time. :-( Now you need to get cited by someone else before wikipedia will accept it. (and preferably someone else needs to be cited too of course)
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It's outsourcing verification, and it mostly works, but "small tidbits" like you find in Hacker News comments now and then will likely never make it.
- skybrian 4y ago
  That's a good rule. Anything you write in a Wikipedia article is written in "anonymous worker bee" mode. It doesn't count as written by you, even if you wrote it. Any editor could change what you wrote. This defeats the whole point of first-person testimony, where who said it matters. If you want to tell the story of something that happened at Amazon, you should write an article on your own website and publish it under your own name. Then anyone can cite it (including Wikipedia) as written by you, and it can't be changed or removed without your consent. (Some might not think a personal blog is a good enough citation, but that's their problem.)
  - 4y ago
jrumbut 4y ago
> "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia article. Using Wikipedia and citing Wikipedia is perhaps ill advised. Using Wikipedia and not citing Wikipedia is a real problem and how you create the circle of falsehoods. This idea of not using Wikipedia introduces students to the academic dishonesty game. Priority one in writing a research paper is that it be a truthful reflection of your research, including limitations, accidents, mistakes, failures, etc, etc.

thesuitonym 4y ago

If scholars find some claim in Wikipedia, they should cite the source of the claim. If the source actually is Wikipedia, it should not be included in an academic paper. It's clear to me now that there is a divide between people who used physical encyclopedias (And thus know what an encyclopedia is for) and those who have only used Wikipedia. They don't understand that an encyclopedia is a place to get a quick overview of a subject, but then use the actual sources of the information to write their papers.

projektfu 4y ago
But only if they actually read the claim. This is the same as for scholars that cite the source of a claim they found in a paper that is, itself, cited from some other paper. Often you see a game of telephone in these citations. Because it's not looked at well to give a factual claim you found in a review paper, researchers often cite the claim as it was cited in the review paper, but they don't always investigate the claim themselves. This leads to a game of telephone. A lot of high-profile factoids are like this. The claim that 95% of diets fail, for example, is a specious one that developed after a citation chain like this. The original analysis said that 95% of the sample finished the study above the lowest weight they reached. Through motivated rephrasing and citation laundering, this became 95% of diets fail, often paired with the suggestion that dieters always return to a weight higher than where they started. Yet, you can find this claim being re-issued again and again in the introductions to papers about all sorts of topics related to dieting. Another thing I have seen is where the source of the claim gets lost. It starts out as something like "Grainger 2003" and then eventually turns into "Grander 2013", a nonexistent paper with a ton of citations. So, if you read an article and don't read the cited article, please reference only the article you read.
youainti 4y ago
Except encyclopedias don't have _actual sources_. They are based on source but don't include references as far as I remember.
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  I was going to tell you that you're wrong, but in looking it up I found far more examples of encyclopedias without sources than with, so maybe that was more common.

mountainb 4y ago

Horsehockey. Wikipedia cannot be cited because it is not a static resource. Occasionally, its citations can be cited. But generally, if you have ever tried to actually follow those citations, you will frequently discover that the authors and editors of the page are full of shit, and you will see why professionals tend to issue the blanket recommendation to avoid ever using it for anything. Minute for minute, research time is better spent on a real resource than it is spent trying to sift something useful from the trillion page shit-vault that is Wikipedia. Newspapers and textbooks aren't serious sources either, which is why academic research manuals usually forbid their usage except in some specific circumstances (such as using them as primary sources, for illustrative purposes, as evidence of what media reported at the time, etc.).

whatshisface 4y ago
These threads always reveal that different people have had wildly different experiences with Wikipedia. I wish everyone would clarify what those experiences actually were so we could answer questions like "is it only some parts of Wikipedia."
AlotOfReading 4y ago
What are you talking about? Wikipedia has a perfectly adequate page on how to cite it [1] and provides tools that account for how dynamic it is in generating citations. Newspapers and textbooks are also regularly cited to demonstrate general facts of knowledge and are usually accepted anywhere other tertiary sources would also be appropriate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
raegis 4y ago
To be fair, you can cite a Wikipedia page along with the last revision date. And the complete revision history is available, I believe. I would expect researchers to include revision dates with any Wikipedia citation.
nico 4y ago
> because it is not a static resource What do you consider a “static resource”?

orangepurple 4y ago

Poppycock. Wikipedia is not a repository of primary sources nor original research. It merely aggregates information from outside sources and should be used as a reference tree.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in their published work When people say not to cite wikipedia, they're telling you to not do this. They're not asking you to plagiarize wikipedia.

jacobolus 4y ago
You would be amazed at the frequency with which “real” academics, journalists, lawyers, judges’ clerks, etc. plagiarize Wikipedia. Teachers telling students they can’t under any circumstances cite Wikipedia trains this behavior.

gubernation 4y ago

[flagged]